Samsara // Year's End
Reflections, Resolutions and Lists Bearing Beauty
Blessings. Rejoice. If you’re reading this, it means you’re still alive (and hopefully I am, as well). That’s not such a bad, moribund thing to think once in awhile. The more you do it, I’d say, the more it transforms into the kind of grief and praise fit for a full life.
There are reasons for gratitude beyond one’s feelings, thankfully, but they only seem to hold sway when we give ourselves over to remembering. Sometimes, life is good and that recognition can be enough. Here’s an example, one that might stoke the kindling of these darker days:
A dear friend has a ritual. During birthdays, he asks the anniversarian to extol three things that they’re proud of in the previous year as well as three they’re looking forward to in the next. It’s not my birthday, but because this little penmanship is still a way of recognizing that not everything lasts, I’ll acquiesce and assume.
If there’s one thing I’m proud of this year, it’s probably endurance. The willingness to grapple with the gait of the times without falling down or into the traps that constantly disable curiosity, nuance and mercy. At the moment, I feel like the presence and success of such virtues is equidistant or tantamount to how intimate we are (or aren’t) with our screens (both physically and figuratively). That said, the black mirror carried forth that endurance this year, which I’m proud to say sallied forth in various forms by really cherished people and publications. The Dark Mountain Project in the UK (in print!), Modern Farmer in North America, Liminal Journal and Ritona // A Beautiful Resistance. Finally, my first Spanish-written essay was recently published via Alba Sud in Spain.
On the aural side of things, The End of Tourism Season 5: Provocations was released. I had the great honour of interviewing
, , , and David Bacon of , among many others. Please check out their work and subscribe to their Substacks. Below are my personal favourite episodes from this last season:
The Future
Likewise, I’ve been a working madman as of late. The End of Tourism Temporada 6: Provocaciones is beginning post-production work. The next season will be an extension of the themes of the last — revealing the ways in which tourism isn’t merely an industry, but penetrates into modern daily life. It will focus on Latin America and Spain and how rigid radicalism, media ecology, narcotraffickers, pilgrimage, the housing crisis and the psychedelic industry all merge at the confluence of an overtouristed world. The episodes will be in Spanish with English (as well as Spanish) transcriptions.
Interspersed between those episodes will be new essays on cacao ceremonies, the “needs” industry, music and the mission of “access,” media ecology meditations, time travel and yes, of course, tourism. On that note, I’ll be opening up comments to all readers, not just paid subscribers.
Beyond essays, I’m slaving over rewrites for two full-length book manuscripts, one on the unauthorized history of modern travel and the other a series of essays asking the unwelcome questions that the psychedelic culture refuses to ask itself. There’s a few others in the closet, one on war & identity, another on radical hospitality and another still on food. Wish me luck and better yet, wish me a publisher who is willing to contend with ideas that don’t seem to belong in either the mainstream or the counter-culture.
Beyond that, it’s hard to say. There will definitely be a return to a mixed-theme, English layout of the The End of Tourism for the season after next, but that might also be the final one. I haven’t decided yet. The truth is, it’s all so much work. Even with the generous support of you all, one has to either dedicate every waking second to it in order for it to be financially feasible or agree to live in a certain degree of poverty. I don’t really have a problem with the latter, but there are other equally important and beautiful projects I’d love to conceive, gestate and birth, while I still can. So, we’ll see and all willing, we’ll be around to see it together.
The Cultural Communion List - 2024 Edition
Books
According to StoryGraph, I read about 45 books this year, not including the constant revision-reading of my own work (which is a lot like listening to your own voice over and over and over again). Apart from the books mentioned at the summer solstice, which were ahhhhmazing, there’s also these gems:
Alice Kane - The Dreamer Awakes
Byung-Chul Han - In the Swarm: Digital Prospects
“No trust is possible in the digital panopticon—nor is it necessary. As an act of faith, it is growing obsolete in view of readily available information… The possibility of quickly and easily obtaining information damages trust. As such, the contemporary crisis of trust is also medially conditioned. Digital networking makes it so much easier to obtain information that trust, as a social praxis, has less and less meaning. Trust is yielding to control. It follows, then, that our society of transparency is approaching the society of surveillance.”
Malidoma Some - Of Water and the Spirit
“Actually, the emptier your stomach is, the easier it will be for you to learn. Other things within us are better nurtured when the body is not fed.”
Mircea Eliade - Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy
Martin Prechtel - Rescuing the Light
“The tenacity of most depression comes from an addiction to thinking with the verb to be.”
Mike Jay - Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind
Peter Lamborn Wilson - Shower of Stars: The Initiatic Dream in Sufism and Taoism
Wolfgang Schivelbusch - The Railway Journey
“Before the development of buses, trains and streetcars in the nineteenth century, people were quite unable to look at each other for minutes or hours at a time, or to be forced to do so, without talking to each other. Modern traffic increasingly reduces the majority of sensory relations between human beings to mere sight, and this must create entirely new premises for their general sociological feelings.”
Music
Admittedly, I prefers entire albums, specifically those that are made to be played/heard as entire albums. A lot of ambient depth and cathartic instrumental listening this year. Here’s the Top 7:
Ballake Sissoko, Emile Parisien, Vincent Peirani - Les Egares
Daniel Herskedal - Call for Winter II: Resonance
Ellen Reid - Big Majestic
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - No Title as of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead
Lynn Avery - To Live and Die in Space & Time
Matt Elliott - Drinking Songs Live 20 Years On
Sarah Neufeld, Richard Reed Perry, Rebecca Foon - First Sounds
Film
Despite most of my screen time this year being spent reading and writing, I did get around to a handful of flickers. My favourites were:
The Peasants (2024), a brutally honest portrayal of peasant life in pre-modern Poland. Beautifully rendered with painted frames and a great soundtrack.
Exhuma (2023), a South Korean film which begins as a slow, run of the mill dark horror, which metamorphoses into an intense mythopoetic metaphor on war, history and politics. A must-watch if you’re into that kinda thing.
La Chimera (2023), an eccentric, emotional, surreal and funny Italian picture which brings together themes of exile, trust, kinship, graverobbing and more.
Well, that’s all folks. May the darker days be ushering you into deeper dreams, into caring arms and sweet regard and remembrance. On these holy days, I raise my glass to all of you, friends and followers, known and less so, that we all may bow to the beauty in the days we have left.
Nazdrovya! Salud! Amen! Cheers!